• by Bill McCloskey , January 8, 2002

Well, it’s the New Year. I’ve had a couple of weeks off from this column and I forced myself to slow down at work a bit to renew myself. By the end of last year I was spent, drained of anything new to say. My personal pendulum had swung all the way over and it was time for a rest so that it could began to swing back.

For both individuals and organizations the New Year represents new possibilities and new optimism. I started to sense it at the end of last week as people started returning to work.

And so I’ve begun to notice movement in the advertising industry’s pendulum. I read in yesterdays’ Wall Street Journal, for instance, that investors believe that there is going to be a big turnaround in the advertising community: Omnicom and Interpublic stock prices are both up over the last quarter, and last Friday there was a rally in the European advertising market. According to the WSJ, while advertising is the first hit in a recession, it is also the first to recover as the economic climate changes.

I expect that we will soon see the pendulum move for publishers also. And by that I don’t necessarily mean in the amount of ads they are serving but hopefully the quality of those ads and the type of advertisers they accept.

Chinese Take Out

While things like rich media were used more frequently last year, the actual quality of advertising in general on the Web went down dramatically. Pop-unders have become the Chinese Take-Out menus of the online ad industry. Those who live in New York know what I’m talking about: every doorway and mailbox is stuffed with Take Out menus from the local Chinese restaurant. One is indistinguishable from the next and I guess they work. But they are annoying and unrelenting and lowest common denominator in nature: you don’t see Take Out flyers for the 21 Club.

Early on, the pendulum was at one extreme: publishers were overly concerned with their audience and wouldn’t do anything that annoyed visitors to the site. As a result, advertising became bland and ineffectual. Now, with cheap media available and falling revenue, the pendulum has moved to the dark side, and it seems that publishers will do anything for revenue including cluster bombing their visitors with thousands of untargeted pop-unders. And as a result, advertising has once again become bland and ineffectual, and users are getting carpal tunnel syndrome from zapping all the pop-unders littering their computer screens.

The pendulum needs to start swinging the other way a bit: we are in danger of falling into a pit of our own making. If online media properties become devalued and associated with the lowest form of advertising, big brands will never be on board. A five star restaurant doesn’t want to be associated with cheap Chow Mein.

We need to reduce the clutter. We need to tell a story with advertising. And we need to stop using technology for technology’s sake: the brand needs to dictate the technology used rather than shoe horning the message into the latest container.

All of this takes education, imagination, and guts. For publishers it means turning down campaigns that devalue the property: the advertising should reflect and support the editorial, not just from a sense of focus but also from a sense of style. I remember when Wired first came out. The advertising and the editorial meshed so that every page was exciting to look out from a layout standpoint. Name me a Web site that you can say the same: CNet maybe, but damn few others.

And agencies, especially traditional brand agencies, need to educate themselves and broaden their palette. Whether they like it or not, people are moving to the Web and leaving traditional media behind. They need to be up to speed or their advertisers will desert them and rightly so.

And advertisers need to demand more from both agencies and publishers. They need to demand that their brands be represented in an integrated way across all media including the Internet. They need to demand better work, better creative, better thinking. And they need to dissociate themselves from clutter, from a dearth of imagination, from the Chinese Take Out menus of the world. Look at BMW. Look at Budweiser. Look at agencies like Fallon, DDB, Chiat/Day, Ogilvy.

Because, quite frankly, I need somebody new to write about.

-- Bill McCloskey is Founder and CEO of Emerging Interest, an organization dedicated to educating the Internet advertising and marketing industry about rich media and other emerging technologies.